But if there were nights in a moonlight garden, there were also
broiling days in an equatorial city with streets hot under foot and an
atmosphere like waves of fire. Julie was moving dizzily and heavily
through life, sleeping badly, dreaming strangely, and forgetting her
food. She sat abstractedly over her meals, staring out beyond her.
"That is the way with you Americans!" Señor Reredo remarked. "You
burn yourselves out at once, forgetting that it must be a slow wick
and a long one that lasts in the hot winds."
"You are ill!" the Señora would declare. "All the fine little bones
in your face are beginning to show."
It was just as well, the girl thought, that the taste for food
had left her, since the fare of the Reredos was almost completely
unpalatable. Julie supplemented it at great expense in an American
restaurant. They sometimes served her carabao's milk, and besides,
during the meals, it was the habit of Chiquito, the pig, to whimper
around the table for titbits, sticking his fore-paws beseechingly on
the children's laps. Chiquito was a clean pig and a very clever one,
but Julie had her prejudices.
She was forced to walk great distances through the hot streets. Livery
carromatas were too dear, and she would not get into nondescript
Tondo vehicles. Once in desperation she had resolved to attempt one
of these conveyances that carried the undercurrent of the city's
life. The rat-like remnant of a horse, whose eyes begged for death,
had stopped its unsteady motion, and the coachman, the veriest dust
of the streets, was signaling the occupancy of the crazy coach,
when a dreadful unconcerned face with small-pox ulcers all over it,
and a cigar stuck in the corner of its mouth, thrust itself out at
her. Death abroad on a jaunt!
The streets with their unfathomable misery of life were an eternal
curiosity to her. It was incomprehensible that men would take
the trouble to go on breathing on such terms. Poor, tawdry, human
procession, with its occasional holiday of soul, when, like ants from
far trails, its units met and rubbed noses unintelligibly. It was good
not to be a gopher or an ant, but to be something that counted very
acutely in the universe. Gophers were born gophers, ants were born
ants--and Julies, by a comfortable decree, were born Julies. It had
all been arranged that way definitely and succinctly by thoughtful
forces and there was no use of aching over it. Gophers and ants must
go on nibbling around the careless feet of the gods. One single human
fleck of pity could not fan the East into life. It was all too big
a proposition for one ineffectual soul.
One day walking home by a new route, she saw in the aperture of a
broken wall, a forlorn old man sitting, looking out with half blind
eyes. Poor old hermit, pondering perhaps with all the hopelessness
of the East, on To-morrow. She stopped to speak a few words to him,
and saw stretching beyond her an alley of broken turns, between
lines of battered old walls. Moved to curiosity, she followed the
alley and came suddenly upon a savage fastness, at the edge of the
sea, a hideous retreat of tattered beggars, who at the sight of the
chance invader came leaping up out of the sand, where they had been
ferociously gambling and matching cocks, and closed about her--a
jeering, threatening crew, followed by a pack of horrible dogs. Out
of their filthy huts made of scraps of tin, boards, old rags,
nipa, more tatterdemalion creatures appeared. The dregs of the city
cornered here! On the shallows of the sea, lay a flotilla of blood-red
sails. What, horribly, did they catch in this nightmare retreat?
Never had she seen human existence in quite so grotesque and satirical
a setting. This was not a picture of the usual native, contentedly at
sea in the universe, nor of the gophers in their sad mud embankments,
nor yet the settled evil of Chinatown, but of a crooked, grimacing sort
of corner where the indigestibles of an Eastern city found haven. Human
grotesqueries! The ordinary panorama of the native's futile life was
disheartening enough, but this blur of savage hobgoblins jeering at
the sun, seizing like Macbeth's witches on the prey of the Alley was
terrifying. She ran precipitately back, tearing her garments from the
women's greedy clutches, with the howls of the Alley in her ears and
their blood-red sails burning on her brain. The horror of the East! The
Pavilion of unreclaimed human waste for which not even God cared!
Stumbling blindly home in the sun with an aching head, she felt that
this hot cosmos into which her life had fallen was a furnace that was
going to consume her altogether. But the medicine, she remembered,
would help this miasma and dull the sick weight of the world. She
climbed upstairs, picked up a box and took a powdery pellet from it.
On the table lay a long, official envelope. She picked it up
abstractedly and broke it open, wondering why the red-haired man
was moved to send out so many meaningless, uninspired messages. She
glanced it over, then suddenly for an instant not a thing stirred
in her. At last her breath broke out of her throat in a sob. Another
blow out of the East!
The Department was very brief about what it had to say. It gave no
specific reason, nor did it go deeply into explanations. It merely
announced that after the end of the current month her services would
no longer be required. It took not more than a line to intimate that
the failure of her efforts in the Southern Islands was responsible
for this decision. If she desired transportation to the States--the
Department was beautifully benevolent about this--it would arrange
it at an expense to her of one hundred and twenty-five dollars gold.
All such savings as she had made had gone at once to Mrs. Morris. She
had no money, so what did transportation to the States or to the moon
mean to her? When she had embarked for these Islands she had assumed
the complete responsibility of herself. But to be pushed out without
a hearing at court--or a cent to depend upon! The red-haired man had
bided his time. Miss Hope who was now in Manila had furnished him
with the weapons of retaliation for that scene in his office long ago.
The East was trying hard to cast her out--and she had asked only
to struggle along and fumble for the end of the rainbow. But never,
never, could one be secure here. In the East, one was like a nation
trembling always on the verge of war, quivering before a catastrophe
that would surely fall. But she would not leave it--till things had
happened. She would not be driven out before her time. She was not
beaten yet. She was not beaten yet. She would not beg, nor starve,
nor explain. If Nahal had done nothing else, it had stiffened her
pride. The Señor had several times spoken of how useful she would be
in his office in the morning to attend to the English aspects of his
practice. She could have employment from him for the whole day.
If they had not spoken of Nahal, if they had not employed that
particularly fatal word failure concerning the work of her heart, she
might have risen to give them battle. But the Department had touched
vitally and cruelly the quick of her soul's pride. Nahal--the single
sacred endeavor she had to her account in the New World--had betrayed
her finally and openly. Barry, the colossus, stood with his feet on
two soils; Shell held in his grasp a savage empire; and Chad, and
multitudes of others, struggled to shape the new existence; but she,
stripped of her pretensions was blowing like a scarecrow to the winds
of the East. Not for worlds would she have had Chad know that his
intuitions concerning her, his resentment of her in his universe, had
been justified. Nobody should ever know this final humiliation--that
she had been weighed in the scales and found wanting.
With that paper on the table her connection with the Builders in the
East had snapped like a cobweb to a star. The Great Experiment had
thrust her out. Henceforth hers was a separate lot, a mere grubbing
for existence. Julie laid her head down on the table and wept inspired
youth's disillusioned tears. The fragrance of the golden jessamine
floated up across the seas from that far, relinquished kingdom of
the soul. A poor, desolate and bewildered spirit mourned outside the
gates of its shining memories.
"My island!" The girl wept after its vanishing outline.
But Julie knew that, though she might bid Nahal farewell forever,
it would still remain an abiding obstacle of soul--a dark enigma
lying heavily across her life.
The Señor was completely satisfied with the new arrangement whereby
she gave her whole time to his service. He was the only person with
whom she was wholly candid concerning her break with the Educational
Department.
Barry, she found hard to satisfy with explanations on this score. She
confessed to him that for a long time she had owed a large debt which
had ridden her back like a nightmare, that expenses were too high
to save anything on her salary and that the Señor's emolument was
in excess of anything that she could expect elsewhere. He looked at
her hard but said nothing. His silence troubled Julie at night. She
knew that he was disturbed that she should have abandoned even her
small part of the Cause, which in these days was in urgent need of
the whole strength of its adherents.
His own business affairs she knew were disintegrating. People said
he had been losing money for some time. But he stuck to what now
commenced to appear as a losing cause. Julie thought miserably of
the time when he would cease to appear in the character of a prince
of the East. He was grappling now with tremendous forces at home and
abroad. The agitation for independence for the Islands surmounted for
the moment every other national concern. The natives awaited almost
hourly its promulgation.
"We're six thousand miles away--in the other half of the globe, and
they can't visualize our problems. They don't understand that they
must hold this thing off far a while. The whole course of history will
be changed. Oh, if they could have one 'look see' into the Pavilion,
Julie! or one glimpse at the holy foundations of the new Asia! I
tell you I can't bear to see this project cut adrift in the universe
alone. Ah, well, I'll be going to China soon, and I promise you I'll
raise every foot of its ancient dust."
Julie adored Barry in his spurts of white wrath, but he was wretched
now as well as angry.
"Cleopatra's barge will not stay afloat. It will sink with its Eurasian
captains in Eastern seas!" Julie prophesied.
He glanced up quickly. "Isabel!" he muttered. "She must be in a
fine frame of mind. Perhaps the grandiose title we gave her may yet
come true. Republics over here will be sadly unsteady things. A
strong hand can too easily twist them into the one-man power the
East understands. It's the effect on China I fear the most. She was
drawing life and encouragement from this experiment, and just at
the crucial moment the whole thing with its far reaching results,
is about to topple into dust!
"The day is near," he told her, "when we must pick tip our packs and
move on."
Julie tried to realize it, tried to plan toward such an eventuality,
but a spiritual as well as a physical inertia enveloped her like a
super-added sheath of being. She exerted herself to the utmost to
hide this new condition from his observation for she knew in what a
desperate struggle he was engaged for the life of the New East. More
than any personal emotion that could ever seize him, she believed,
this passion gripped his heart. And for one who had achieved nothing
in this issue, who had actually been flung out of all its purposes,
no legitimate appeal remained. Her dazed being still responded acutely
to all his problems--but the greatest of them all had left an agony
in her soul.
Once he looked at her very troubled. "What's the matter, Julie?" he
begged.
And Julie seeing that in that moment he had forgotten everything but
her, grew frightened in spite of her exultation.
"Oh, it's just the effects of the sunstroke!" she exclaimed, drawing
herself defensively up.
"I'll take you to see Braithwaite," he said. But he was summoned away
on another of his critical errands, and the visit to Dr. Braithwaite
did not take place.
Nevertheless Julie was stirred to concern by the abnormal agitations
within herself. She scrutinized herself in the glass one day, and
was startled by what she saw. The delicate outlines of her face,
which looked like sculptured crystal, reflected a disturbing inner
ravage. Under her lower lip a singular bluish shadow, which for some
time had been dimly suggested, had become definitely marked, as if
some menacing malady were revealing its first sign.
She was puzzled and a little alarmed. She resolved to go and see a
doctor, only to remember that in her present unstable state she dared
not risk the complication of the cost. She consoled herself with the
thought that if she were really ill more malevolent symptoms than
these would have declared themselves.
Her mind skirted lightly an under-current speculation concerning
the medicine she had been taking. Because it had become so
indispensable, she did not actually attempt closely to question
it. It was unquestionably, peculiarly and irregularly derived; but
it certainly was not poison, as her use of it had proved. And it did
work; it took pain away;--whatever abnormal after-agitations it might
produce--and just now that was what overwhelmingly counted. Back of
that fact she was not disposed to go. Rosalie had been perfectly right
when she said that a large part of the valuable drugs of the world
were to be found wild here. Julie herself had walked through pungent
jungles and forests and felt that she was traversing some universal
pharmacopoeia. The natives of Nahal through the use of herbs, which
were the only medicinal aids at their disposal, had learned how to
exist quite without doctors. Julie had a consciousness that clung to
any sort of panacea. She manifested always an inability to stand upon
her own spiritual powers. This particular panacea, she was however
aware, had caught upon some vital fiber. On blistering days when the
heat hung in the air like a stifling blanket and all the forces of her
being refused to go on, the old crone's nostrum dropped a soothing
veil over her blinded, quivering senses and freed her awhile from
her intolerable burden.
It helped also in another struggle, the struggle to keep from
understanding, as the days passed in the Señor's office, why her
services were so valuable to a pupil who paid so high a price to
make no progress at all. Subconsciously she had sensed for a long
time at what this artistically indirect method aimed. As the Señor's
vocabulary of gallantry began to come out more clearly from behind
its Spanish ambush, the girl sometimes felt as if she were hanging by
a hair over a precipice. She cursed devoutly her knowledge of French;
for though she pretended not to understand, the translation would too
often come out on her burning face. She dared not be angry; she could
not revolt: were not her last bridges cut behind her? Between her and
the most desperate extremity, this situation alone interposed. This
slow, creeping Spaniard was the rope on which she must balance
across the cataract. So when opulent emerald rings and rare rubies
were discovered lying casually upon her desk--for her to admire--and
were waved back silently upon her when she tried aghast, to return
them to their owner, she could only employ the foolish subtlety of
remarking how much Señora Sansillo would appreciate these intended
gifts of her thoughtful husband.
It was a silly strategy, executed by a crude man in the crudest
way. There was no spirit in it; the lovely stones stood for nothing
but an ignorant man's misapprehension of the human soul. It would
have been laughable to the girl had she been in other than a desperate
plight. Nor could she laugh at anything that caused her so to despise
herself, her own ignoble clinging to such a rope of life.
But she would not retreat from her individual stand. Barry alas,
had troubles enough now. And this place, which had monstrously and
unjustly, and without a hearing, cast her out, should receive no
appeals from her. One must make a final stand on one's own in this
shattering world--and not if she were to die to-morrow would she
come out and declare her failure. She was still desperately, so she
conceived, the mistress of her own fate.
Then at the climax of these over-head emotions, would come an
engulfing ennui, as if all this stir were but an eternal pouring
of water through a sieve. To keep alive in this fearful foreign
whirlpool, one had to struggle every instant. Something seemed to
be thrusting her gradually toward the edge of a dark and fatal pool,
and there was creeping over her an appalling weariness of life.
One day she received word that Isabel wished to see her. She had
not seen Isabel for some time. After having been discarded from the
real life of this colony and forced to her present anomalous mode of
livelihood, she shrank from encounter with the brilliantly successful
ones whose rival she had once essayed to be. As the outcast from the
Great Project that Chad had predicted she would become, her despair at
seeing those who had entered the race when she had, became sometimes
more than she could combat. The wretched queerness of her being lately
had made her morbidly acute.
Isabel most of all had seemed to press this superior fortune pitilessly
upon her, had even, so the girl thought, demonstrated a hint of
hatred on their meetings. This thought troubled Julie; but she could
not bring herself to ignore the summons, for not only had Isabel's
friendship more than once been turned to account, but Isabel sending
for her in this unexplained way, showed that she had something vital
to say. Out of this infinite restlessness Julie wondered, as she set
out for the house of the caliphs, what was to develop.
Everything appeared unchanged. The old keeper, with the withered face
like a Chinese nut, who had told her the first time she had seen the
place that this was the dwelling of a "daughter of the country," came
forth from his lodge and ushered Julie into Isabel's domain. Absolute
stillness pervaded the house. The dwarf, who had watched her acutely
as he conducted her up the stairs, disappeared. The pensiveness and
inertia of the tropical afternoon had fallen like a sad mood over the
exotic world. Julie looked about her and sighed. She felt a desire
to get out of this ageless Asian splendor down into the sun of the
street. To-day the teak wood called up visions of distant sweating
bodies. The shining dark floors stretched like black waters beneath
the feet; the heavy golden curtains stirred as under Indian magic;
and the ivory Buddhas dozed in a changeless Nirvana. Perfume hung in
the air: the smell of myrrh and aloes and cassia out of ivory palaces,
mixed with the odors of dying flowers. Back in the next room, in a
corner where she could just glimpse it, was the gilt shrine of the
Green God, who from time immemorial had inspired in the hearts of
men the fear of fate.
Abruptly at an invisible warning, Julie's eyes swerved sharply. A
sinister brown face gleaming like an evil star from a chaotic mass
of black hair appeared half concealed among the potted palms. Julie
rose almost defensively.
"Isabel!" she exclaimed, with a tremulous voice. She did not wish this
changeling, who could assume at will the soul of either of two races,
to see how disturbed she was.
The Malay woman bore down upon her in stormy silence.
"I haven't seen you for a long time," Julie said, agitatedly
casting about her for a means to meet this mood. "I lead a hard,
busy life." She spoke of the difficulty of her existence as if the
fact of it might somehow appease Isabel, who drew nearer and fixed
upon Julie a gloomy concentration.
There was something almost thirst-like in this examination. Isabel
appeared to be straining for something that lay beyond the girl's
own consciousness. The sun had given Julie a glow of color, and when
she essayed to smile the old miracle of look transfigured her like
a sudden star lighting brightly the weariness of earth. Isabel waved
a demolishing hand before it.
"Futile, futile flame! I knew it would burn itself out. You want me to
believe," she went on fiercely, "that you are in a deep struggle--that
you are giving your soul to be ground up for some fine cause. But
you can't deceive me. I know that you are a malingerer--and that,
whoever's bones may be broken by the wheels, they will assuredly not be
yours. In the vigil, the peril, the anguish of this fool's dream, you
have had no part. You have sat and waited--like an imbecile sphinx--for
something to come along and solve your foolish riddle. The very stars
have sung in your ears, and you have not heard. Nothing has touched
you--nothing can!"
In sullen challenge, she swept on. "Why were you not content with your
little hillcock, and your wretch of a man-ant? Why have you to stretch
out your foolish disastrous hands to pull a world to pieces? You know,"
she rushed on, fiercely, "that our friend Barry along with the rest
of them--stands on the brink of complete catastrophe; that the great
structure he believed he had created is about to fall about his head;
you know too what the love of these things is to him--yet you thrust
yourself between him and a single saving chance; you who could blow
away out of the world like a feather, without consequence to any
one! It is always exasperatingly weak things like you who plant their
feet in the course of fate. I have sent for you to tell you that you
had better take yourself out of the way."
Julie stared with a beating heart at this being to whom she was as
a kindling to a flame.
"I don't know what you mean by my being in the way," she stammered
weakly. Isabel stood somberly glaring at her. What was in this woman's
mind? What was it all about? Her eyes turned to escape this dark
distorted vision, and ran along the wall's stream with an armory
of poisoned weapons, each of which was forged to deal death in a
particularly monstrous way.
Her mind struggling with its fears caught at the vague intimation of
hope for Barry in Isabel's wild utterances. "Oh, do you mean that
he could be saved--out of the wreck? You could do it, Isabel, of
course. Oh, don't," she pleaded desperately, "let him be driven out!"
"Do you think you have to plead with me, you little wastrel? The East
will requite those who truly give themselves to it. There will be a
place in it for Barry--but there will never be any place for you--that
is what I want you to understand. When the hour comes to requite him,
I warn you not to intervene."
Julie's spirit asserted itself. "What is going to happen to him?" she
demanded.
Isabel flung at her a contemptuous glance, and exclaimed in a sudden
abandon of revelation: "The finest thing that ever happened to a
white man in the East."
The girl's head sank. Upon her memory had flashed the new portentous
words exchanged in Barry's house between Isabel and the white Rajah
of Ramook. Her whole being felt suddenly borne down. Her lips slowly
paled; the light swept out of her face, leaving it a chill, ghastly
white.
Isabel strained forward, her eyes riveted on the blue blur which
stood out now under the girl's lips. "Ah!--" she said, and sank back,
while Julie moved unsteadily to the stairs.
She went through the down-dropping dusk of the garden, in utter
hopelessness of mood. The choice of the starry ways cut off forever.